“Now we are ready, as I judge,” he said as he stowed this with the other supplies. “Up you get, my dear. It has been five years and more, if memory serves me, since I have taken you on a drive.”
He helped her to the seat and mounted ponderously to sit beside her. The springs creaked beneath his weight. “Gee up, Dapple,” he commanded, flicking the reins.
Away they rolled, sitting together like a massive tame bear and a gazelle. They had to wait at a crossing while a close-jammed throng of people passed, feet hurrying and faces frightened. Then they continued, along the Uxbridge Road. They fared westward, slowed down by traffic both on the street and on the sidewalks. Challenger drove with careful attention, his great hairy hand light but authoritatively firm on the reins. The sun was well up, and the crowds were thicker at every crossing. Policemen tried to control the rush, but the policemen, too, looked frightened.
“I hazard the speculation that our Martian visitors are closer at hand,” said Challenger. “Whatever they are doing, it stimulates the desire to stay well away from them.”
Checking his horse, he leaned down to call to one of the crowd. “What news have you?” he asked.
“It’s all up with the soldiers,” was the panting reply. “And they’re scorching the whole country with their heat-ray, and drowning it with their black smoke.”
Waiting no longer, the man ran ahead to northward along a cross street, Challenger clucked Dapple into a trot.
“Heat-ray,” he rumbled. “Black smoke. I have seen something of the one and have heard something of the other, and Holmes suggests that they may have deadlier weapons. I doubt if Holmes is being unduly pessimistic. Well, these considerations impel me not to seek a possible ship on the Thames. We’ll keep going out of town. Perhaps we can get beyond this rush.”
“If we stayed in London, George—”
“If we did, it would be like staying in a burning house, or possibly worse than that.”
Her dark eyes were wider than ever. “Oh, George, what must England’s scientists be thinking?”
“I can tell you, my dear Jessie, exactly what they are thinking, if we may flatteringly apply such a term to their inadequate mental processes. They are thinking that they were wrong again, and that G. E. C. was right again, and they hope that they have not begun to think too late in the game.”
“Too late?” she repeated, her voice hushed in terror. “Is disaster upon humanity?”
Challenger reined Dapple into the middle of the street to avoid a hastening wheelbarrow.
“That, Jessie, is a question not susceptible of any but a qualified reply. It is quite plain that humanity has fought and lost its first battle and is in demoralised flight. But I reflect that such things have happened in past wars. Frederick the Great was obliged to fly from his first battle. So was Sherman, the American general, at Bull Run. Yet both of them proved victorious later.”
“Later,” Mrs Challenger said, almost dreamily. “Later.”
“We shall see what happens later. At present, suppose we emulate those other brilliant tacticians in the orderly swiftness of our retreat.”
But it was with no great swiftness that they drove westward into Clerkenwell. The sidewalks at the crossings were full of people, and a stream of vehicles clattered in the streets — cabs, private carriages, carts, heavy wagons, bicycles. The air shook with the roar of wheels, the louder roar of voices. Once a bulbously fat man in a derby hat tried to catch hold of the cart and climb up behind, and Challenger cut him across the face with the whip to make him let go. Beyond Clerkenwell they came into Shoreditch, and at last, as the sun rose to high noon in a hot blue sky, they found themselves on Mile End Road, on their way out of London.
“Good horse, then,” Challenger praised Dapple. “You have done nobly. How old are you, do you suppose? Jessie, it is fifty miles and better to the east coast and possible safety. Prepare for a long summer jaunt of it.”
“I feel perfectly safe with you, George dear.”
“And you do well to trust to me. But I believe I said something like that earlier today.”
Though they had come well past the center of town, traffic was heavier. The road seemed jammed from side to side, with horses and carriages all going eastward at a nervous trot.
“I do hope that this great crowd of travel will grow thin again,” said Mrs Challenger, pressing her little body close to her husband’s side.
“A vain hope, Jessie,” was his bleak reply. “Look there ahead.”
Pedestrians also moved into the road, so thickly pressed together that Challenger had to rein Dapple to a walk. People shoved pushcarts, trundled perambulators heaped with cluttered possessions. As Challenger tried to make a way through without striking anyone on foot, a great carriage drawn by two glossy bays came rolling from behind and would have run upon the little cart had not Challenger swung around where he sat and whipped the nearer horse with all his strength. The animal emitted a startled, squealing neigh and reared so abruptly that the carriage was almost overturned. Challenger won through a knot of people, and beyond turned to the right along a side road, little more than a grassy-bordered lane.
“Where are you taking us?” Mrs Challenger cried out. “That is the direction of danger.”
“The direction of what may be better progress,” he half snapped. “The main thoroughfare is too cluttered. At any moment, it could become impossible to travel there. Country ways may be better.”
He drove a full mile before turning again and travelling toward the east, through the outlying cottages of a little hamlet. As he had foreseen, it was less crowded, though vehicles moved here, too. Several hurrying people cried out to be taken into the cart, but Challenger paid them no attention.
At last he drew out his watch. It was three o’clock, and they had made gratifying progress. He allowed himself to wonder how the invaders fared, how closely they might be pressing this tremendous retreat from London. A look into the crystal—
“Oh, abomination!” he cried aloud, in something between a furious yell and a groan of self-accusation. “I left it in my study, in an old tea canister!”
“In your study?” echoed his wife anxiously. “What, George?”
“Oh, no matter now,” he wheezed. “I suppose even the greatest, the most advanced of intellects, must sometimes overlook a matter.”
“George, you were too concerned in bringing me to safety.”
At that, he mustered a smile that stirred his beard like a wind in a dark forest.
“Bringing you to safety, Jessie, is a measure that must assume precedence over all else. Do not concern yourself.”
Ahead of them showed a bit of green meadow, with flowers fenced in beyond. He turned the cart from the road and upon the grass.
“We will stop for a time,” he declared. “Poor Dapple has been going long and faithfully, and he should rest. So, when it comes to that, should I. And so, by making a scientific judgement, I think should you as well.”
“Would it not be better to keep going along, George?”
“Not if we are to see our excellent little horse able to take us to the ocean.”
Mrs Challenger fell silent, as she had learned to do when her husband spoke with such determination. Challenger got heavily down and went to pat Dapple’s cheek. He was answered by a soft whinny.
“It is good that you and I are on such friendly terms,” Challenger said, unhitching Dapple from between the shafts. He took off the bridle and used a rein to tether Dapple to a wheel. At once Dapple began cropping lush June grass.
“We have not eaten since early this morning, Jessie,” said Challenger. “Perhaps you will look out materials to give us a pleasant al fresco dinner. I shall go find water for Dapple.”
He walked off toward the fence with the flowers. On the far side showed the roof and windows of a brown cottage. Mrs Challenger lifted out the big basket, spread a blue-checked cloth on the ground, and set it with two plates and some sandwiches and fruit. She had finished
drawing the cork on a bottle of Burgundy when Challenger came tramping back, a bucket of water in either hand, and, slung across his broad shoulder, a crumpled dark fabric.
“The house is deserted,” he informed her. “Sensible people — they have fled before the report of danger. I found a pump, and here is water for us and for Dapple as well.”
“And what else have you there?”
“Two blankets. I found them hanging on a clothesline. It may be a chilly night for this time of year, and we must camp here.”
He gave the horse water and watched it drink gratefully. Then he came to sit cross-legged on the ground and eat with hearty appetite. Mrs Challenger barely bit into her sandwich and swallowed a few grapes. Challenger coaxed her to drink a glass of wine with him.
“Here is a toast to our present situation,” he said, lifting his own glass. “Confusion to these importunate visitors, and a safe journey to us.”
She, too, sipped. “But so much of disaster has come already,” she said, her voice hushed with gloomy foreboding. “I keep thinking of those scientists you say died so horribly — Mr Stent, and Mr Ogilvy. Surely you mourn them, too, the more because our Earth could use their knowledge and advice today.”
“As to their knowledge and advice, I can find nothing in those things to feel great deprivation in their loss,” replied her husband gravely. “I regard the scientific attainments of both Stent and Ogilvy with an indifference that partakes of professional disdain. But you are right, dear Jessie, in reminding me that I should be sorry that they have died. It was a wretched death, let me assure you, and an entirely unnecessary one.”
This condescension seemed to relieve Mrs Challenger, who ate another sandwich of roast chicken and had a second glass of wine. They sat at ease and talked, while Dapple grazed near the cart. The sun set at last, and peace seemed to abide in the cloudless sky as it darkened.
“I am getting sleepy, George,” said Mrs Challenger at last, yawning behind her tiny hand. “That is strange, don’t you think? Last night I slept barely at all.”
“Which is the exact reason you feel like resting now. Let me arrange these blankets for you. Wait, before we spread them. I shall hollow you a bed.”
Powerfully he scooped away soft lumps of turf, to make a depression that would fit her body. Then he tramped here and there, picking up dry wood under trees that fringed the grassy plot. He brought back a great armful and then another.
“This is enough for a small fire to take the chill off, and with careful supervision it will last out the night,” he said in his lecturer’s voice.
“But will you not lie down, too?”
“Later, my dear.”
She crept among the folds of the blankets. He sat by the fire crooning a favourite song of his:
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky
Ring out the old, ring in the new
His wife seemed to be comforted, as by a lullaby. At last he heard her breathing gently and regularly in slumber. But he sat awake in deep thought.
He wished he had brought the crystal, and ventured the hope that it would stay safe, with his house safe as well, while the invaders moved through on their way up from Surrey. If Holmes were here, there might be profitable discussion of the dire situation. He remembered what he had seen the last time in the crystal and clamped his teeth beneath his beard. Despite his repeatedly expressed contempt for humanity in general, the thought of a fellow man given to such a fate made his blood run cold.
Again he remembered Holmes’ letter and the suggestion that man was but a lower animal in the harsh view of the invaders. Did Holmes suggest that the invaders, then, represented an advanced form of life developed by evolution from the human form? Did humanoid creatures exist, or had they existed, on other worlds of the universe?
As he asked himself these things, a night bird sang close by, its voice strangely sweet in a world so terribly threatened. What might the invaders think of birds? He took the bottle from the basket and drank another glass of wine, then rinsed the glass in the bucket and walked through the night to fetch more water from the well in the cottage yard.
It was nearly midnight, as his watch told him, when the sky suddenly glowed with a racing streak of green light, like the path of a flying meteor. Surely another cylinder, he knew as he watched it drop to the western horizon and wink out of sight. Very likely it was landing in Surrey, near the others. Quickly he counted in his head. Midnight of Monday — this would be the fifth arrival. Five more were hurtling earthward on their way. They would find their fellows triumphantly in possession of Earth’s largest city.
At last he lay down on the blankets and slept.
He was awake at sunrise, brushing dew from his beard. He carried the buckets to the well beside the cottage. A cyclist in dusty clothes stopped in the front yard, and Challenger let him drink gratefully from the bucket.
“What is happening?” Challenger asked.
The cyclist dully told him about flight from London, of riding desperately all the afternoon and most of the night. The Martians had cloaked the Thames and its banks with their black smoke, killing crowds of helpless people who had not been able to get away. But no fighting-machines had seemed to come eastward out of town so far.
“Perhaps they’ll be satisfied with London,” croaked the cyclist, wiping his dirty face.
“No longer than time enough to establish themselves there,” said Challenger authoritatively. “Afterwards, they will range further.”
“And what will they do?”
“It will take some perception to divine their future tactics.”
The man mounted his bicycle and pedalled away. Challenger carried the buckets to his own campsite and held one for Dapple to drink. Mrs Challenger, too, was awake. She had tucked back her hair and folded the blankets. They dipped a cloth to wash their faces and hands, and made a breakfast of bread and fruit and tinned herring. She took a little copper pot from the basket to boil tea for them.
“And now?” she said. “It seems so peaceful here.”
“It seemed more or less peaceful in Enmore Park, only last Thursday. Shall we go along?”
He reharnessed Dapple and they rolled off on the road.
“Such a good horse,” said Mrs Challenger. “Dapple — it is a good name, I think.”
“A common name, and a fairly descriptive one,” Challenger replied. “But thus far, he has shown some evidence of being an uncommon horse in an uncommon situation. He is strong, willing, and docile. Our relationship with him is uncommon, in more ways than one.”
“Uncommon, George? How so, apart from the crisis, the emergency?”
“A question well worth the asking, my dear,” he lectured. “I have been giving some considerations to the problem of what these invaders think. And I agree with Holmes that to them mankind is a mere race of lower animals. They may well regard horses as a different species in a broad category of inferior creatures. But as to Dapple, should he be as extraordinary among horses as myself, or even Holmes, among men, then he will nobly serve our needs. I hope that he will bring us to the Channel coast before nightfall.”
They found carriages and hurrying pedestrians on the road. One huge dray wagon came thundering from behind, making the little cart wheel far to the side to avoid being hit. Challenger’s blue eyes shone dangerously, but he said nothing to the driver. They fared on their way for some hours. Occasionally, at crossroads, they caught glimpses of the main road to the north, jammed with traffic.
“How wonderfully wise you were, George, in deciding to take us along by these side ways,” Mrs Challenger said.
“The same thought occurred to me independently,” he returned.
At noon they pulled into the dooryard of a deserted inn to eat a hasty lunch. Challenger went inside to look for possible fresh supplies, but found nothing other than two bottles of ale, which he fetched to the cart. They let Dapple rest for an hour, then drove along.
By mid-afternoon they found the traffic much thinner
about them and approached a scatter of houses that Challenger took to be in the southern part of Chelmsford. From the yard of one of the houses a group of men came running out across the road as though to stop them, holding up their hands. Challenger reined in.
“What is it?” he growled. “What do you want?”
The men closed in around Dapple, four of them. Three were sturdy fellows, dressed in rough clothes like laborers. The fourth, a sinewy little man with top boots and a peaked cap, might have been a jockey or a groom. His sharp face grinned toothily.
“We’re the Committee of Supply of the town of Chelmsford,” he proclaimed. “We’ll just be taking this horse, sir.”
Challenger leaned his huge body forward above the reins. “Will you, indeed?” he asked dangerously. “And why do you presume to do that?”
“For provisions,” said the little man, his hand on Dapple’s bridle rein. “To eat. Since it’s your horse, you can have a slice if you like.”
“I have been told by Frenchmen that horseflesh is succulent and nutritious,” said Challenger, setting himself to rise quickly. “I cannot speak to that of my own experience. But you must immediately disabuse yourself of any notion that we will give up this horse.”
“Hold hard, whoever you are,” spoke up the biggest of the others, moving close beside the wheel. “We mean business.”
“Exactly,” nodded Challenger, with something of baleful cheer in his manner. “Business. And I suggest you attend to your business elsewhere.” With ungainly swiftness, he sprang down from the cart. “Be off with you!”
He gave the little man a shove that sent him staggering half a dozen paces away. The others, too, fell back into a knot, scowling. Challenger hunched his shoulders massively and bent his thick knees as though for a spring. His two hands spread themselves, their fingers like hooks.
War of the Worlds Page 11